Vaccine misinformation and social determinants of vaccine intentions during a pandemic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13109246 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ankit Shanker (0000-0003-3353-8053, University of Warwick, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-20 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-18 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Behavioural Public Policy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2398-063X • E-ISSN: 2398-0648 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/bpp.2025.10012 |
| OpenAlex | W4414339682 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 30 |
The aim is to examine how vaccine misinformation shapes perceived social norms and assess their mediating role in vaccination intentions during pandemics, an underexplored mechanism in misinformation’s influence on vaccine decisions. In a pre-registered online experiment, UK residents ( n = 332) were randomly assigned to either a misinformation or control condition in a hypothetical pandemic scenario. I measured changes in vaccination intentions, first-order normative beliefs (perceptions of others’ vaccination intentions) and second-order normative beliefs (perceptions of others’ beliefs about vaccine safety) before and after exposure. Causal mediation analysis using inverse odds ratio weighting assessed the indirect effects of misinformation through changes in normative beliefs. The pre–post comparison revealed that vaccine intentions declined 2.5% more in the misinformation condition compared to the control group (p = 0.024, d = 0.24). In the misinformation group, average vaccine intentions dropped from 62.4% to 59.3%, while the control group showed minimal change from 60.8% to 60.2%. Changes in first-order normative beliefs mediated 39.52% of misinformation’s total effect on vaccination intentions. The findings reveal that vaccine misinformation operates through dual pathways: directly affecting individual beliefs while simultaneously distorting perceptions of social consensus about vaccination
Mediation · Misinformation · Normative · Pandemic · Perception · Social norms approach · Typhoid vaccine · Vaccination · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy
The Grammar of Society
oTree—An open-source platform for laboratory, online, and field experiments
Misinformation
Social Value of Public Information
Mediation
The theory of planned behavior
A general approach to causal mediation analysis.
Rational Ritual
Norms in the Wild
Antecedents and Consequences of Information Overload in the Covid-19 Pandemic
Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking
The critical role of second-order normative beliefs in predicting energy conservation
How Does Media Influence Social Norms? Experimental Evidence on the Role of Common Knowledge
A focus theory of normative conduct
Measuring the impact of Covid-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |